


Everything and Nothing

by Zigzagwanderer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Romance, Casualties, Kylux - Freeform, M/M, Sad with a Happy Ending, Space Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-15
Updated: 2019-06-15
Packaged: 2020-05-12 07:35:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19224595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Standalone little thing between prompt-fills.Thank you very much for reading!!! Xxxx(Title from David Sylvian)





	Everything and Nothing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Boysnextdoor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Boysnextdoor/gifts).



i.

There is fire, the colours of rage, and madness, kaleidoscoping the black. Shreds of silver snarl across the battlefield, the debris of a thousand decimated ships.

“We have a beacon, General.”

There are always fewer bodies than one would expect; space itself must swallow them.

Hux turns. 

A proximity alarm sounds. 

The detonations and percussions are coming too fast for the sensors to comprehend, let alone counter. But there is no mistaking the cleaving in two of an enemy cruiser, as it slipstreams destruction, screaming in its death-throes, colliding unstoppably with Hux’s wounded flagship. 

He is slammed into the bulkhead of the bridge. Pain blooms, as does the novelty of failure. 

All because he hastened to the rescue. All because he hesitated to abandon the attempt. 

The comms leader wipes blood from her screen with broken fingers, and tries to finetune Ren’s signal through the sparks and static. 

“Is that him, General?” 

“Yes.” Hux says, because it has to be.

“Can we at last commence the retreat?” The officer’s voice is shrill against the criss-crossing counter-commands and incoming distress signatures. 

“Wait.” Hux crawls to the viewer and pulls himself upright. 

As he watches, Ren’s personal craft swirls, oddly, amongst the dancing dogfights. Half of it is missing. The trajectory for rendezvous is off by all vectors. 

“Lord Ren,” Hux calls down the wire, holding himself steady. “We have little time left. Once you reach the docking bay…”

“No.”

The relay snaps the one word out, faintly. 

Hux scrapes at his ears.

“I am ordering you to return _immediately_ …”

“You don’t understand. I won’t make it back.”

The General shakes his head. Scorched hair comes away in his hand. His chest feels flooded.

“I won’t make it anywhere. I’m done, Hux. I’m…sorry.”

“I...I…my lord…”

“…too late.” Ren cuts in. Cuts out. 

Then, with terrible clarity, Hux hears him.

“Why did you never say anything?”

Hux is scrabbling for his holopad. Searching for his weapon. Seeking a miracle, of all things, among a damned ship of godless men.

He stops. “What?” 

Ren sounds very far away. “Please don’t deny it, Hux. Please. Don’t tell me you don’t feel the same way.”

Hux blinks. “Ren, you must use the manual controls…”

“It doesn’t matter now. And I know I have no right to ask. I have been a coward, and a fool.”

“Ren.” Hux curls his shoulders over. The sudden impact, the realisation, is excruciating. “I demand that you get back here,” he manages, and it comes out like a plea. “We can speak of this.”

Ren is defenceless, headed outwards, towards oblivion. 

“Can’t.” It’s simple, and final. “Levels are critical. I don’t think I have long.”

Hux makes fists of his burnt hands. “Use something…there must be something you can do?”

A weak laugh filters through. “If you mean can I work magic, then no. My captors purged me of midi-chlorians, Hux. That's what their laboratory was for. I escaped, I always knew you’d be coming for me, but it’s all gone…”

Ren sounds unafraid. Young. Regretful. Free. 

“If you’d have said _anything_. Anything at all, Hux. Anything to give me the smallest hope that you felt as I did. I would have loved you with everything I had.”

An officer approaches and Hux pushes him violently away. 

“I’ve loved you for so long, Armitage.” 

“Ren.” Hux cannot breathe. 

“We were so perfect together. Ruthless. Glorious.”

“I know,” Hux whispers. “Ren. I…was afraid. I scarce knew how to recognise…what it was. Something took away your hatred of me, and mine for you, but I convinced myself it was ambition, not…affection, that changed us. I never let myself believe…I did not think anybody else could live with such an agonising sweetness as I did, inside. Forgive me. I knew my own feelings, but I was not certain of what you wanted.”

Ren laughs again, growing quieter as he gets further out of range. “What I wanted? Hux. In the end, all I really wanted…in the entire universe…was…you.”

Hux stares past the conflict outside. Past the last rebel stragglers as they scatter. 

Past the exultant remnants of the First Order.

Victory. Hux was born for it. The most glittering of rewards. The most worthless of trash.

“General. Do we continue to engage?” An officer shouts. Hux stands there, pressed against the port. “Your instructions, General?”

Hux can no longer see Ren’s disintegrating fighter between the outlying stars.

“What?”

Hux stumbles sideways. Straightens. Starts walking away. 

His boots slip on the spilled blood of his ship. He coughs through the smoke. 

“I’m going to bring back my Lord Ren.”

“Sir. General, sir. You can’t leave. It’s suicide. And we need you to confirm the evac…”

Hux pulls Lieutenant Waverley’s blaster from his belt and shoots him in the throat. 

Scrubbing the splatter out of his eyes, Hux starts to run. 

He takes the first transport he finds, up, and out. 

He is no pilot; he skims the collapsing hull. 

Misfiring cannon strafe the bow; a shot wings him.

There are clouds of condensing energy. Electrical discharges. 

Boiling metal scrapes the transport as the Finaliser trembles into pieces.

Its dying heart implodes, and there is light, then there is darkness, then there is silence.

 

General Waverley destroys the transcripts of his predecessor’s final comms dialogue. The restructuring of the First Order requires the memory and strength of hatred, not something as unenduring as love.

And there are always fewer bodies than one would expect; space itself must swallow them.

 

ii.

You can drink from the stream, if you tire of homemade wine, or honeyed milk. 

You can eat the creatures that live in the stream, if you tire of the harvest. 

You can even wash in the crystal-cool, fast-flowing water of the stream, so long as you don’t mind the minerals that are swept down from the mountains putting a little glitter into your hair.

The odd flake of gold, in the fiery red of one man’s beard.

Soft scintillations of blue and green mica-leaf, in the dark locks of the other. 

The days are long, and leisurely, and it is an afternoon’s idle entertainment for the two of them, the combing out of such tiny jewels. 

And such tasks are invariably a slow, lazy precursor to slow, lazy lovemaking. Touching always leading to more touching, to bliss and to the contemplation of the soul and the worship of the body, to thanksgiving for the life chosen and the forgetting of a life not simply lost, but deliberately discarded. 

Their bed is big, and forever beckoning.

And sometimes they dress, afterwards, or before, and sometimes they do not.

In the season of heat, they get brown, and one of them freckles all over. 

Shoulders, back, collarbone and hips.

In the cold months they map those many freckles, and hibernate, for the most part, and read and talk and learn new ways to tease out cries and whispers from one another. 

And they keep their shack in a comfortable mess, full of books and fishing gear and tools, and small, necessary, shared, day-to-day projects; the making of a basket, a pail, a clay cup.

And they keep their hidden armoury immaculate, blaster and sabre both.

Side-by-side.

Fully operational.

Just in case.


End file.
